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Saturday, April 26, 2014

Peg o’ the Mounted (Universal, 1924)

I began the evening, before running our “feature,” with an
intriguing 12-minute short from Universal in 1924 starring “Baby Peggy,” a
child star from the silent era whose career not only anticipated Shirley Temple’s
but who seemed to be the beta version of Temple. At least as far as she can be
judged from this little movie, she shared Temple’s enviable spunkiness and
wise-beyond-her-years assertiveness without playing the saccharine
sentimentality that has made Temple’s name a swear word for a lot of old-movie
buffs who can’t understand why she was literally the biggest star in the
country between 1935 and 1938 (and another
recently deceased juvenile star, Mickey Rooney, succeeded her at the top of
that list in 1939!). Baby Peggy was born Peggy Jean Montgomery in San Diego (!)
on October 26, 1918 and according to imdb.com is still alive (!!), though she
wasn’t the first pre-pubescent girl to become a major star (Virginia Lee
Corbin, who starred in a weird series of movies in the late teens with
all-child casts parodying the blockbusters of the era, preceded her) and when
people think of actresses playing children’s roles in the silent era, they
usually think first of Mary Pickford, who (much to her disgust) kept getting
cast as kids even into her early 30’s. Like Shirley Temple, she realized once
she hit adulthood that the way to a healthy and happy grownup life was to get
the hell out of showbiz forever, and unlike Temple she cut herself so far off
her early fame that she even changed her name, becoming a children’s book
author and signing her works “Diana Serra Cary.” At least one of Baby Peggy’s
films, Captain January (1924, her
first feature), was remade with Temple (in 1936, same title).

Peg o’
the Mounted is a charming little 12-minute
short (the surviving print came from the Netherlands and was retitled Hands
Up!) in which Baby Peggy is living in a
mountain cabin in Canada (“played” by Yosemite National Park, by the way). She
seems to be living there alone — at least there’s no sign of adult habitation;
when the film begins she’s doing her own laundry with a washboard and tub, and
the only mention of her parents is a brief reference in a title (this version
left in the Dutch titles and ran English titles under them) to a father who
left her a child-sized Mountie outfit which she could wear as a mascot for his
troop. An unrelated Mountie (Bert Sterling) comes to her cabin, wounded in the
pursuit of a gang of “moonshiners” (the Dutch titles simply call them “liquor
smugglers” and imdb.com says the original U.S. prints called them bootleggers —
though real bootleggers from Canada generally didn’t make their own stuff; they
simply bought legally obtainable booze on the open market and smuggled it
across the U.S.-Canada border), and Baby Peggy feeds him a tablespoon of
Sloan’s Liniment and rubs down his face with castor oil. When he’s still
incapacitated despite her dubious ministrations, she pledges to go after the
gang of bootleggers and capture them herself — which, of course, she does. She
goes after them with a pistol and actually holds three of them at gunpoint
before the gang leader (Jack Earle) sneaks up behind her with a rifle and
disarms her, but she manages to sneak away (there’s a nice scene in which she grabs on to Earle’s legs to follow him and he wonders why his legs seem to be getting heavier) and ultimately tie up the liquor smugglers
with a rope and drag them to the police station — only to be embarrassed
because along the way she lost her mini-Mountie uniform and showed up there in
her undies. Baby Peggy suffered the usual fate of the child stars of her
generation — her parents (and, in her case, her step-grandfather) ran through
all her money and left her broke and reduced to extra work (in an interview in
the Fall 2010 Films of the Golden Age she recalled being on the “panic list,” the ex-stars who out of
compassion got first call for extra assignments), though eventually she changed
careers and wrote a biography of Jackie Coogan (the first true child superstar,
who lost his fortune to his gambling-addict father) and some other books about
pre-teen Hollywood.